The Conscious Tweeter

All in one weekend I became a blogger and a tweeter. I've finally entered the world of communication. I'm still learning Twitter etiquette so if you have tips for me please share.

So through following UrbanEducation I found this great article called "The Conscious Classroom," by Adam Doster (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080225/doster). It starts off with a story about a community on Chicago's West Side coming together in a hunger strike in order to make the plans of building a school happen. It's not very often you hear this kind of story. You may hear about communities getting angry and frustrated, but a hunger strike for a school? That's pretty amazing to me. Once the school was built they wanted the curriculum to focus on social justice and their community struggle. This is a pretty progressive way of thinking.

The article goes on to mention Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator, who said that traditional education is "suffering from narration sickness," where teachers shove facts at students with no explanation of their meaning. In many schools this is probably still true. But in schools like mine, since it's a Catholic school with a focus on teaching the whole child and not just academics, we try to expose our students to curriculum with substance. What I mean by this is, take my science class for instance. We watched the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" and afterwords my girls were concerned about what would happen to our world if global warming became out of control and we went through another extinction. This brought us to how the world began and the evolution of species. We were able to tie this into religion when they wanted to know how evolution could be true when they believe in the creation story and that God made the world in 7 days (this is something I will discuss further in another blog after I read Finding Darwin's God). I feel fortunate to be able to discuss such issues with out my administration having a fit, but instead they embraced this teachable moment. Of course this doesn't happen in every school, especially not traditional public. I guess this is what Freire is trying to say.

This brings me to another point in the article which says how conservatives feel these progressive social justice schools are enforcing leftist views on their students. I feel, and the article does as well, that teachers are just exposing students to what is going on in our world. It's not that they want all the students to take a leftist view, it's that they want them to see that there are real problems occurring everywhere, whether that be in their own neighborhood or the Congo in Africa. The teachers can do this by integrating it into the curriculum like this: "A science teacher can plant an urban garden, allowing students to learn about plant biology, the imbalance in how fresh produce is distributed and how that affects the health of community residents. An English teacher can explore misogyny or materialism in American culture through the lens of hip-hop lyrics. Or as Rico Gutstein, a professor of mathematics education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, suggests, a math teacher can run probability simulations using real data to understand the dynamics behind income inequality or racial profiling."

These types of lessons are the kind that engage students. Students need something to relate to and not just memorizing facts. Think back to when you were in school, didn't you yearn to learn more if you were forced to just memorize and not ask questions? Don't you wish you had an opportunity to participate in lessons like the ones i stated previously? I love this idea of social justice schools and since they seem to be placed in low income areas I feel it's really teaching students to be proactive and change the situation they were born into. Maybe this will help to try to bridge that gap that is ever widening between the rich and the poor.